Chapter 7
What starts as a niggle soon becomes an itch, then a rash, then a full-blown compulsion. I crave the pain of a tattooist’s needle.
One lunch break in December, I forgo the Pret sandwich and Heat magazine and make a break for a tattoo parlour near Spitalfields market.
I walk in, feeling self-conscious about my sober trouser suit and silk blouse.
I sit in the waiting room and bury my head in the flipbook of tattoo images, aware of the heat of curious stares from some nearby goth kids.
I do not look like body art material. I concentrate on the whirr of the tattoo needle as it works on someone else’s ankle, only a few feet away.
Only when my name is called does my breathing settle back into its usual rhythm.
I move towards the back of the shop, where pictures of tribal symbols and grandfather-clock tattoos stare down at me from everywhere. The tattoo artist looks up expectantly, waiting for me to produce an image or visual reference.
‘I’m not sure what to get,’ I admit. ‘Something that symbolizes loss, I think.’
His whole demeanour shifts. He stands up. ‘Nup,’ he says, rearranging his needle on the table. ‘I’m gonna need more than that. Come back when you’ve had more of a think about this.’
‘No, no,’ I tell him, panicking slightly. ‘I mean, I do know. I’ve thought about it. Genuinely.’
He looks at me with disdain, me in my jacket and kitten heels and indecision.
‘A big and a small elephant. One blue, one pink. Like a mother and baby.’
Something about this defrosts him; makes him look me in the eye for a long moment. He pulls out his phone, scrolls for a bit and finds a simple outline of two cartoon elephants, entwined in an embrace.
‘How about a minimalist piece, like that?’ he says, his finger trailing the simple outline. ‘You can add more detail at a later time, if you like.’
As the needle hits my hip bone, I feel something approximating relief, for the first time in a long time.
Later on in bed, my cling-filmed hip, with its angry-looking skin and new elephants underneath, catches Johnny’s eye.
‘I thought you didn’t like tattoos,’ he says.
Johnny loves nothing more than to remind me of the times I said something with absolute conviction and then contradicted myself later.
These moments are few and far between, so he goes at them like it’s Super Bowl Sunday.
He licks his eye teeth with a sort of gleeful relish.
‘I thought you said they’d look stupid when people are on the beach at seventy? ’
‘Can you not just let me have this one thing?’ I ask him quietly, soberly.
He doesn’t ask what the tattoo is of, or what it means. Neither of us bothers to say the quiet part out loud: I made a decision, and a fairly big one at that, without him. They may only be two elephants on my hip bone, but in some small and strange way I’m pushing ahead, on my own.
‘Come have a look at this,’ Johnny says, gesturing me towards the laptop. He has a page open, full of holiday deals. Blue skies, yachts and aquamarine ocean as far as the eye can travel.
‘Croatia could be a good place to … get away to,’ he says. ‘Or maybe Thailand.’
‘Hnyeah,’ I tell him. He keeps clicking away. Is he really that oblivious to the fact that we are humming in two completely different keys these days?
‘Canada could be fun,’ I offer.
He looks at me quizzically. ‘The cold place over North America?’ Johnny’s idea of a relaxing time is to find a sun-lounger, keep a sweaty beer at hand and read all the New Yorkers he never gets to at home.
‘There are beaches in Canada,’ I tell him, the image from the jetty floating to my mind’s surface.
‘Try lying on them in January and see how toasty you feel,’ he says. ‘You’ve never mentioned Canada in your life before.’
‘Just, I’ve heard it’s kind of cool. Toronto has the most restaurants per capita in all of Canada.’
‘We live in London. We don’t need to go too far if it’s a restaurant you need.’
‘It’s not really that. I thought it might be nice to call in on a friend who lives there.’
‘What, that old school friend of yours? That I’ve never heard of until now?’
I’d forgotten all about her. ‘Well, yeah, there’s her, but … I don’t think you’ve met the other friend. Naomi.’ He doesn’t ask me who she is or how I know her.
‘Gotta tell you, Esther, I’m not all that keen on taking time out to go on a city break to Canada,’ Johnny says baldly. ‘What about somewhere we can really relax and just … be with each other. I think it would be a big help right now. It feels like a long winter.’
So maybe we are in the same key. He feels it too. But it doesn’t stop me wondering how I can persuade him to come around to the idea of Toronto, where we wouldn’t have to just be with each other.
Johnny looks over for an uncomfortable amount of time before finally saying, ‘Are we good, Esther?’
The gear-change catches me. ‘Course we are.’
‘No, I mean really.’
‘Yesssss.’
‘I think we should talk about what’s going on here. Like properly.’
‘We are fine. More than fine. I promise.’ Are we fine? I feel like I’m watching something or someone getting injured in real time, but with no idea how to call for help or what to do about it.
I can foresee the next bit a mile off.
‘Well, I’m bloody well not, but good for you,’ he says mid-stride as he makes for the door. The slam echoes off the mock-wood furniture, only serving somehow to regulate my pulse.
‘Mind if I have a word, Esther?’ the Swede in the Ozwald Boateng suit commands, flopping his head around the door.
I’m in the middle of searching ‘Ted Levy Bathurst’ on Twitter, to see if anyone has posted seeing him in his own neighbourhood.
A few nights ago, a stranger took a picture of him at a bar in Leslieville.
I must have stared at it for an hour, racked with longing and jealousy of a complete randomer.
The Swede and I walk wordlessly down the oyster-grey corridor to a shark-grey meeting room, where he throws a tasselled loafer on the stool closest to me and does a sort of casual squat over the oversized glass and chrome desk. Still, the vibe is less than casual, as I take it.
‘I’ll get right to the point, Esther,’ the Swede begins, folding his arms. ‘This time last year, you were inputting about five thousand five hundred codes a day into the system. That number has now fallen to about two thousand three hundred. You can see how there’s a discrepancy between those two figures, and how that might be considered unacceptable, or at least reason to open up a conversation. ’
Wow. I know I was going a bit easier than usual, but not by that much. I thought being chewed out by the higher-ups might feel terrible, but strangely it doesn’t. I feel bulletproof.
‘This is having a knock-on effect in the wider operation,’ the Swede continues. ‘Last week, we missed a few major deadlines of our own as a direct result of the performance within your unit, so you can see why this cannot be allowed to continue.’
‘And have you talked to Cathy about her performance targets?’ I shout with more venom than perhaps necessary.
‘Cathy has had to pick up the slack, and while she hasn’t been so indelicate as to say it out loud, I doubt she is best pleased.’
He looks at me expectantly, awaiting some sort of explanation. What am I meant to say here? That keeping tabs on a dozen people in Toronto and readying myself for any new information on a man I’ve never properly met is taking up more of my waking-hour bandwidth than it reasonably should?
When no explanation is forthcoming, the Swede huffs softly.
‘I acknowledge you’ve had a challenging time in the past year, and perhaps we need to start looking into an alternative working arrangement, or at least some kind of more … restful scenario for you,’ the Swede suggests.
My eyes clearly light up at the prospect of taking extended paid leave, and he sees that.
‘As you are on a casual contract, we could perhaps think about going part-time, or taking unpaid leave,’ he suggests.
‘Or perhaps we could investigate the possibility of a job-share. We could leave your position open, for a certain and reasonable amount of time, if that is something you are open to considering.’
I want to tell him that I want to get myself to a position in life where I don’t need his bag-of-shit job, even if I shared it with a dozen others, but I don’t.
Besides, we need the money. Johnny never tires of telling me his plans for us to retire at sixty with a million-pound pension – what exactly he will do then, God himself only knows – and much of that plan is contingent on me not telling this lad here to go and shite.
The Swede takes my weary silence as either tacit agreement or an unspoken acknowledgement of my challenging year, and he makes to leave. As he goes, he gives me a barely there pat on the shoulder.
‘Let’s keep the internet searching for celebrities to out of office hours,’ he says.
On the walk back to fluorescent-lit purgatory, the broad contours of what a life with Ted might look like are starting to form.
We’d spend summers in upstate Ontario, taking a cottage by the lake with friends.
We would fly to Banff in winter, getting frisky in hot tubs as the snow falls all around us.
Canada’s celebrity power couple. The pair that everyone wants to be around.